The Manuscript Hunter: Brasseur de Bourbourg's Travels Through Central America and Mexico, 1854–1859 by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (review)

Brasseur de Bourbourg is universally known in the field of Mesoamerican studies for his discoveries of major written sources, especially those left by the Maya. Among them are the K'iche' epic of the Popol Vuh, the dance drama Rabinal Achí, the Yucatec pictographic manuscript today referred to as Codex Madrid, and Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. However, as Katia Sainson, translator and editor of the volume, notes, the legacy of Brasseur de Bourbourg as a scholar is tainted by his later speculations on the ancient Maya script as an encrypted code and on the origins of American indigenous civilizations, which he traced to the ancient Egyptians and even the fantastical island of Atlantis. As she read Brasseur's diaries and letters of his American travels in the original French, Sainson was surprised to discovered an acute and original observer of the cultural and historical complexities of the countries that he visited.

The book provides not only the first English translation of three major travelogues by the French priest but also one of the few modern appraisals of his work. Awareness of Brasseur's outlook and experiences throughout Mexico and Central America is indeed necessary to understand his keen and widely recognized ability to retrieve important sources on Mesoamerican civilizations. How could he have found, transcribed, and translated such foundational pieces as the Popol Vuh and Rabinal Achí had he not been an intellectually sound scholar? Although his later interpretative works are more akin to the imaginative and fantastical drawings of Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, who illustrated Brasseur's Monuments anciens du Mexique (1866), his philological work should be read alongside John Lloyd Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (1841) or Claude Joseph Le Désiré Charnay's and Alfred Percival Maudlsay's early photographs of Maya archaeological sites, as Stainson notes in her introduction (4). There are, however, also some differences between Brasseur's approach and that of Stephens and other contemporaries. The French priest showed a much more vivid interest in living indigenous cultures and not just vestiges of the past. He learned K'iche' in order to work in the communities of the Guatemalan Highlands where he researched and labored. He considered recent and ancient history as present not only through language and oral lore, but also through the tangible heritage of ancient sacred sites, such as caves and mountain tops.

The book presents three distinct travelogues: 1) two letters written to Alfred Maury regarding Brasseur's wanderings in Central America (Nicaragua and El Salvador); 2) a journal of the travel from Guatemala City to Rabinal; and 3) Brasseur's lengthy account of his trip by boat and land from New Orleans to Tehuantepec, in the Isthmus of Oaxaca. As the author notes in extensive comments, Mexico and Central America were ravaged by civil wars whose violence brought not only death and misery to the human populace but also destruction to the patrimony. Brasseur also remarks on the mismanagement and failing of the Louisiana Tehuantepec Company, an enterprise that long before the opening of the Panama Canal offered a connection by sea between the two coasts of the United States.

Although some degree of humorous French chauvinism may be at play here, Brasseur offers a remarkable analysis of Mexico's War of Reform, which was unfolding in 1859 when he traveled through the region. He traces its roots to the historical consequences of the conquest and the racial domination, seeing the ideological juxtaposition of Church and liberalism as a mere masking of these issues (175–179). Another keen observation: Brasseur's genuine and surprisingly unprejudiced interest in nagualism, the ability given to humans to transform into all sorts of animals and travel through time and...